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"Similar Threads" Section

hey kwun, i'm just curious:

how much stress does the "Similar Threads" section (at the bottom of the page whenever you click on any thread) put on the BF webserver?
it seems like it'd be quite a computationally intensive task, but i suppose that IF it only checks this based on the initial post of the thread and saves the results, it wouldn't take too much computing power.

either way, i think it's actually a pretty cool feature! probably my favorite thing that came with the forum upgrade

BG, i don't know the mechanism for the relevence. but there are criteria that can be defined in the admin page. i cannot imagine it will be a search everytime a thread is displayed, there bound to be a lot of pre-processing done before hand and when a thread is displayed, it will be a simple look up. otherwise the load on the server will go up like crazy.

so far, i haven't noticed any slow down since turning it on. we have our own dedicated server so there are plenty of room to grow!

yeah, first time i saw it i forgot it's probably a simple lookup, but if it does it based on the whole thread, and every "relevant" word in it, then that could still end up taking a lot of time, need to add results after every post, so it's probably only based on the initial post i'm guessing.

either way, i've actually used it a couple of times, and it's great for newcomers to the forums, who hadn't seen earlier threads - and they dont even need to search!

I think it's done by searching the first couples of the key words. In most of cases (I would say 75%), the similar threads are very closely related to the thread I am looking at, but sometimes, it doesn't when we put some irrelavant sentences in it, the internal seaching just can not understand what to find for the similar threads (It doesn't have AI )